Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century

Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century

Dorothy Roberts

Language: English

Pages: 400

ISBN: 1595588345

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub

This groundbreaking book by the acclaimed Dorothy Roberts examines how the myth of biological concept of race—revived by purportedly cutting-edge science, race-specific drugs, genetic testing, and DNA databases—continues to undermine a just society and promote inequality in a supposedly “post-racial” era. Named one of the ten best black nonfiction books 2011 by AFRO.com, Fatal Invention offers a timely and “provocative analysis” (Nature) of race, science, and politics by one of the nation’s leading legal scholars and social critics.

probabilistic nature of genes. Forget about the hyperparents who want to implant math genes in their unborn children, the ‘Gattaca’ corporations that scan people’s DNA to assign them to castes, the employers or suitors who hack into your genome to find out what kind of worker or spouse you’d make. Let them try; they’d be wasting their time.”92 But the problem is not that hyperparents, corporations, and employers really can do these things with genes; the problem is that they think they can—and

Afghanistan and Iraq, lawyers in the Bush administration embarked on a mission to set a sufficiently high standard for torture to render the military’s harsh custodial conditions and interrogation methods permissible.67 President Bush himself set the machinery in motion on February 7, 2002, when he issued a memorandum declaring that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to detainees in Afghanistan and Guantanamo.68 The legal edifice erected to shield torture has direct antecedents in the colonial

cholesterol. In the two decades since Barker’s discovery, hundreds of studies have replicated findings of developmental “programming” that links small birth or infant size with higher blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity in adults. Today, Kuzawa is following the same children, now in their twenties, some of whom have babies of their own. “We are moving beyond the point of wanting to conduct yet another study that shows this inverse association. We want to understand the mechanisms,” Kuzawa tells

self-identified African Americans failed. But understanding why NitroMed targeted this market in the first place, and why a group of scientists, doctors, activists, and politicians vehemently supported this plan, sheds light on the ways that contemporary science is reinforcing, rather than eliminating, antiquated ideas about race. BiDil’s Conversion Heart failure is a debilitating illness that affects millions of Americans and kills tens of thousands every year. It occurs when the heart